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ESA plans mission to smallest asteroid ever visited

ESA’s planet-defending Hera mission will set a new record in space. The asteroid investigator will not only be the first spacecraft to explore a binary asteroid system – the Didymos pair – but the smaller of these two worldlets, comparable in size to Egypt’s Great Pyramid of Giza, will become the smallest asteroid ever visited.

Earth’s atmosphere stretches out to the Moon – and beyond

A recent discovery based on observations by the ESA/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, SOHO, shows that the gaseous layer that wraps around Earth reaches up to 630 000 km away, or 50 times the diameter of our planet

Hubble helps uncover origin of Neptune’s smallest moon Hippocamp

Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, along with older data from the Voyager 2 probe, have revealed more about the origin of Neptune’s smallest moon. The moon, which was discovered in 2013 and has now received the official name Hippocamp, is believed to be a fragment of its larger neighbour Proteus.

MAVEN Spacecraft Shrinking its Orbit to Prepare for Mars 2020 Rover

NASA’s 4-year-old atmosphere-sniffing Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission is embarking on a new campaign today to tighten its orbit around Mars. The operation will reduce the highest point of the MAVEN spacecraft’s elliptical orbit from 3,850 to 2,800 miles (6,200 to 4,500 kilometers) above the surface and prepare it to take on additional responsibility as a data-relay satellite for NASA’s Mars 2020 rover, which launches next year.

ISS suffers another leak, but this time of the messy, non-dangerous, type

Around 11 liters of water leaked into the International Space Station (ISS) during work to prepare for the future installation of the Urine Transfer System (UTS). Although the incident was minor compared to the more worrying pressure leak caused by a hole in the since-departed Soyuz MS-09, it once again highlights the day-to-day maintenance required on the orbital outpost that will play into lessons learned ahead of crewed deep space exploration.

NASA Probe Snaps 1st Photos from Just a Mile Above Asteroid Bennu and the View’s AMAZING!

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission is orbiting an asteroid closer than any spacecraft has ever orbited a body — and it shows in an incredible pair of photographs that the team released yesterday (Jan. 24). The spacecraft slipped into orbit around the asteroid, called Bennu, on Dec. 31, after the team carefully mapped the object to design a safe path for the probe. That was a challenge, since Bennu is the smallest space rock that’s ever been orbited.

Why are there no stars in most space images?

There are a few questions that we get all the time at The Planetary Society. Look up at space at night from a dark location and you can see innumerable stars. Why, then, do photos of things in space not contain stars? How come the black skies of the Moon contain no stars in Chang’e photos? The answer: The stars are there, they’re just too faint to show up.

Saturn’s rings are ‚very young‘

We’re looking at Saturn at a very special time in the history of the Solar System, according to scientists. They’ve confirmed the planet’s iconic rings are very young – no more than 100 million years old, when dinosaurs still walked the Earth.

The rings of Saturn may be iconic, but there was a time when the majestic gas giant existed without its distinctive halo. In fact, the rings may have formed much later than the planet itself, according to a new analysis of gravity science data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft.

Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 Recovered, Collecting Science Data

The Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 was brought back to full operational status and completed its first science observations just after noon EST today, Jan. 17. The instrument autonomously shut down on Jan. 8 after internal data erroneously indicated invalid voltage levels. The Wide Field Camera 3 was installed on Hubble in May 2009 during the last servicing mission. It has taken over 240,000 observations to date and is the most used instrument of Hubble’s current complement.

Genaue Startdaten von Boeings Starliner zur ISS stehen angeblich fest

China’s Moon Plants Are Dead

The moon is a lifeless world once again. The cotton plants that sprouted on the moon’s far side aboard China’s Chang’e 4 lander are dead, done in by the bitter cold of the lengthy lunar night, GBTimes reported today (Jan. 16).

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Credit issue header picture: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Ocean Moons, Promising Targets in Search for Life, Could Be Dead Inside

For more than two decades, scientists have wondered whether extraterrestrial life may be flourishing deep below the icy coatings boasted by moons in our outer solar system. Spacecraft like the Galileo mission to Jupiter and the Cassini mission to Saturn have stumbled on evidence that some of their moons hide global oceans, warmed by the pull of the giant planet they orbit. And oceanic explorers much closer to home have discovered dynamic communities living in darkness around geologic features on the ocean floor. Combine the two and it’s easy to be carried away with dreams of alien seafloors teeming with microbes. But new research is looking deeper, into the rock itself, and suggesting that these worlds may be dead inside — not just biologically, but geologically as well.

Shutdown Grounds NASA’s Airborne Observatory

The ongoing partial government shutdown has grounded a NASA aircraft used for astronomical observations amid reviews about how to operate that program in the future. The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), a Boeing 747 with a 2.5-meter telescope mounted in its fuselage, has been unable able to perform any science flights since the shutdown started Dec. 22, project officials said during a town hall session about the program Jan. 8 during the 233rd Meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) here.

Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway: NASA’s Proposed Lunar Space Station

The Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway is a proposed NASA program that would bring astronauts to the moon to operate a lunar space station. The concept has generated a wealth of research and numerous political discussions since 2017, especially because NASA’s stated goal under the Trump administration is to return to the moon before going to Mars.

Cotton Seed Sprouts on the Moon’s Far Side in Historic First by China’s Chang’e 4

Before China finished packing up its Chang’e 4 lunar lander to be blasted off on a never-before-accomplished journey to the far side of the moon, scientists slipped in a small tank holding plant seeds. And now, the team announced, a cotton seed has sprouted.

There Is Now Life On Two Worlds In Our Solar System

China Details Future Moon Plans, Including Polar Research Station

China’s bold moon-exploration plans don’t stop with the pioneering Chang’e 4 mission, which made the first-ever soft landing on the lunar far side on Jan. 2.

The State Council Information Office of China (SCIO) held a press conference Monday (Jan. 14) to discuss that epic touchdown, and to give an overview of the nation’s future activities on Earth’s nearest neighbor.

Hubble Space Telescope’s Glitchy Eye Should Clear Up Soon

The Hubble Space Telescope’s main eye on the universe should be back up and running soon. Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) took itself offline last week as a safety precaution, after onboard software noticed anomalous voltage readings within the instrument. But Hubble team members have now determined that voltage levels actually remained within the normal range, ascribing the glitch to a telemetry issue rather than a power-supply problem.

Hubble Space Telescope’s Camera Eye Suffers Malfunction

A hardware problem has put the main camera onboard the Hubble Space Telescope out of operation, according to a brief statement released by NASA today (Jan. 9). The issue with the Wide Field Camera 3 occured on Jan. 8 at 12:23 p.m. EST (1723 GMT), according to the statement. NASA did not provide any details about the glitch itself beyond saying that it was caused by a hardware problem and that the camera carries redundant electronics that could be used to get the instrument running again.

A close view of an ultra-distant fossil is helping to answer questions about the formation of planets throughout the universe. NASA’s New Horizons probe buzzed the outer solar-system object early on New Year’s morning, making the first flyby of such a primitive object. Because 2014 MU69 has remained virtually untouched since the birth of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago, it can reveal new details about that era. Already the first puzzling photos are helping to prove models of the early solar system.

After Ultima Thule Flyby, New Horizons Hits Pause on Data Dump

The New Horizons spacecraft fell silent yesterday (Jan. 4), but the communications pause is expected, and scientists on the mission will have plenty of data to keep them busy during the intermission, mission staff members said during a news conference held Jan. 3.

The first resolved photos of Ultima Thule have come in from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, which zoomed past the frigid faraway object just after midnight yesterday (Jan. 1). The historic imagery reveals that the 21-mile-long (33 kilometers) Ultima is a „contact binary“ composed of two roughly spherical lobes.

At 2:43 p.m. EST on December 31, while many on Earth prepared to welcome the New Year, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, 70 million miles (110 million kilometers) away, carried out a single, eight-second burn of its thrusters – and broke a space exploration record. The spacecraft entered into orbit around the asteroid Bennu, and made Bennu the smallest object ever to be orbited by a spacecraft.

OSIRIS-REx Enters Orbit around Asteroid Bennu

At 2:43 p.m. EST (7:43 GMT) on December 31, 2018, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft went into orbit around asteroid Bennu — setting new records for the smallest body ever orbited by a spacecraft and the closest orbit of a planetary body by any spacecraft.

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx has started orbiting asteroid Bennu

After NASA’s OSIRIS-REx arrived at asteroid Bennu in early December, its ground team quickly started measuring and mapping out the celestial body. They needed all the information they could get in order to enter Bennu’s orbit, since the asteroid has such a small gravity pull. Sounds like the scientists were able to get what they needed, because OSIRIS-REx has successfully started circling the asteroid at 2:43 PM ET on December 31st.

Record Breaker! NASA Probe Slips into Orbit Around Asteroid Bennu

A NASA asteroid-sampling probe has begun circling its space-rock target, setting a new record for the smallest body ever orbited by a spacecraft. The OSIRIS-REx probe achieved orbit around the 1,640-foot-wide (500 meters) near-Earth asteroid Bennu with an eight-second engine burn today (Dec. 31) at 2:43 p.m. EST (1943 GMT).

Chinese Moon Rover Making Tracks on Lunar Far Side (Photo)

China’s far-side moon rover is already busy exploring its exotic new home. On Wednesday night (Jan. 2), the Chang’e 4 rover and its stationary-lander companion pulled off the first-ever soft touchdown on the lunar far side, coming to a rest inside the 115-mile-wide (186 kilometers) Von Kármán Crater. The six-wheeled rover, known as Yutu 2, isn’t pausing to catch its breath, as a newly released photo shows. Yutu 2 has already put a fair bit of space between itself and the lander, trundling over near the rim of a small crater on the floor of Von Kármán, which itself lies within an even larger impact feature — the 1,550-mile-wide (2,500 km) South Pole-Aitken Basin

China Makes Historic 1st Landing on Mysterious Far Side of the Moon

China’s robotic Chang’e 4 mission touched down on the floor of the 115-mile-wide (186 kilometers) Von Kármán Crater Wednesday night (Jan. 2), pulling off the first-ever soft landing on the mysterious lunar far side. Chang’e 4 will perform a variety of science work over the coming months, potentially helping scientists better understand the structure, formation and evolution of Earth’s natural satellite. But the symbolic pull of the mission will resonate more with the masses: The list of unexplored locales in our solar system just got a little shorter.

Resist the ‚Dark Side‘ of Moon Names: The Lunar Farside Is Plenty Bright

Pink Floyd has a lot to answer for when it comes to popular ideas about the moon, but here’s how to always keep your lunar sides straight.

Let’s start with the farside, where China’s Chang’e 4 lander touched down yesterday (Jan. 2), making China the first country to land a spacecraft there. Our moon has a nifty trick: It’s tidally locked to Earth, which means that one half of the lunar surface always faces us, while the other half always faces away from us.

Watch Alexander Gerst’s return to Earth

ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst is wrapping up his second stay on the International Space Station, the Horizons mission, running over 50 experiments for the partners of the weightless research laboratory as well as maintaining the outpost. Alexander became the second ESA astronaut to take over command of the International Space Station.

NASA Astronaut, Crewmates Returns to Earth After 197-Day Mission

Three members of the International Space Station’s Expedition 57 crew, including NASA astronaut Serena Auñón-Chancellor, returned to Earth Thursday, safely landing at 12:02 a.m. EST (11:02 a.m. local time) in Kazakhstan. Auñón-Chancellor and her crewmates, Expedition 57 Commander Alexander Gerst of ESA (European Space Agency) and Soyuz Commander Sergey Prokopyev, launched June 6 and arrived at the space station two days later to begin their mission. Over 197 days, they circled the globe 3,152 times, covering 83.3 million miles.

New Horizons Spacecraft on Target for Superclose Flyby of Ultima Thule

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft will indeed get very close to the mysterious, distant object Ultima Thule on New Year’s Day. Mission principal investigator Alan Stern today (Dec. 18) gave the all-clear for New Horizons to stay on its optimal flyby course, which will take the probe within just 2,200 miles (3,500 kilometers) of Ultima Thule at 12:33 a.m. EST (0533 GMT) on Jan. 1.

What to Expect When New Horizons Visits 2014 MU69, Ultima Thule

New Horizons is rapidly approaching its New Year’s encounter with the most distant world ever visited, 2014 MU69. Closest approach will be at a distance of 3,500 kilometers at about 05:33 on 1 January UTC, and it’ll happen at a zippy 14.16 kilometers per second. Space fans can’t wait to see pictures of this distant, tiny world, an ancient relic of the formation of our solar system, which the mission and NASA have nicknamed “Ultima Thule,” until it is formally named. (I think we should all get to give it our own nicknames. I’m partial to „Moo,“ or maybe „Peanut.“)

Hell Yes, NASA’s New Horizons Will Buzz Right Past Ultima Thule on New Year’s Day

Today was the last possible day for mission controllers to adjust the trajectory of the New Horizons spacecraft as it approaches Ultima Thule, a distant Kuiper Belt object. With no detectable dangers in sight, NASA has given the green light for the spacecraft to remain along its optimal path—a trajectory that will result in an intimate flyby in just two weeks time.

via TheSkyLive: The Solar System at your Fingertips – December 19, 2018 at 09:26PM

Saturn loses its rings / Saturn verliert seine Ringe

Saturn’s Rings Are Beautiful, But They Won’t Last

Chances are, you wouldn’t recognize Saturn without its trademark thick band of rings. But if you could travel 300 million years into the future, you would need to, because by then, chances are those rings would be gone — and they could disappear even faster.

Ringless Saturn? The Planet’s Famous Feature May Be Surprisingly Young.

Saturn’s rings are among the most eye-catching sights in the solar system—and yet they haven’t always been there. A new analysis suggests the planet’s majestic bangles might be so young that if dinosaurs looked up, they could have witnessed an otherwise plain, straw-colored Saturn putting a ring on itself—one that would have been briefly enormous.

Saturn is losing its rings: NASA says they will be gone in 100m years

The rings are being pulled into Saturn by gravity as a dusty rain of ice particles, a new NASA study has revealed. Ring particles are caught in a balancing act between the pull of Saturn’s gravity, which wants to draw them back into the planet, and their orbital velocity, which wants to fling them outward into space. ‚We estimate that this ‚ring rain‘ drains an amount of water products that could fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool from Saturn’s rings in half an hour,‘ said James O’Donoghue of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Steph Curry is sorry for all the trouble his moon-landing comments have caused. On a podcast that aired last week, the NBA superstar said he doesn’t believe that humanity actually landed on the moon. The offhand remark (which was echoed by several other NBA players on the podcast) went viral, prompting a wave of reaction from folks imploring Curry to clarify or repudiate his stance, and to educate himself about NASA and spaceflight history.

Chang’e-4 Successfully Enters Lunar Orbit

China’s Chang’e-4 lunar mission, the first-ever soft-landing endeavor on the lunar farside, launched successfully on 8 December at 02:23 Beijing time (7 December at 18:23 UTC) via a Long March 3B rocket from Xichang Satellite Launch Center. The launch carried a lander and a rover toward the Moon. On 12 December at 8:45 Beijing time (16:45 UTC), the spacecraft arrived in lunar orbit, preparing for a landing in early January.

China Launches 1st Mission to Land on the Far Side of the Moon

The first-ever surface mission to the far side of the moon is underway. China’s robotic Chang’e 4 spacecraft streaked away from Earth today (Dec. 7), launching atop a Long March 3B rocket from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center at about 1:23 p.m. EST (1823 GMT; 2:23 a.m. on Dec. 8 local China time). If all goes according to plan, Chang’e 4 will make history’s first landing on the lunar far side sometime in early January. The mission, which consists of a stationary lander and a rover, will perform a variety of science work and plant a flag for humanity in a region that remains largely unexplored to date.

For the first time, both astronaut Nick Hague and his wife are sharing dramatic details about a failed rocket launch in October. Hague was in a Soyuz rocket headed for the International Space Station when a violent booster failure forced them to abort the mission mid-flight, 31 miles above earth. „It was going perfect for the first two minutes,“ Hague told CBS News correspondent Mark Strassmann. „And then all of a sudden there was this violent shaking side to side. … And the alarm’s going off. And I see a red light that’s lit up and it says that you’ve had an emergency with the booster.“

It’s time to say goodbye to one of the most storied explorers of our age: Voyager 2 has entered interstellar space, NASA announced today (Dec. 10).Voyager 2, which launched in 1977, has spent more four decades exploring our solar system, most famously becoming the only probe ever to study Neptune and Uranus during planetary flybys. Now, it has joined its predecessor Voyager 1 beyond the bounds of our sun’s influence, a milestone scientists weren’t able to precisely predict when would occur. And intriguingly, humanity’s second crossing doesn’t look precisely like data from the first journey out.

New Horizons – Ultima Thule

Ultima Thule in Sight! New Horizons Probe Snaps New Photo of Its Target

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has beamed home another glimpse of the distant, icy body it will zoom past just three weeks from now. The small object Ultima Thule swims amid a sea of distant stars in the new composite photo, which New Horizons snapped with its Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) camera at around midnight EST (0500 GMT) on Dec. 1.

Final Approach to Bennu – OSIRIS-REx Mission

This set of images shows the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft’s view of Bennu during the final phase of its journey to the asteroid. From Aug. 17 through Nov. 27 the spacecraft’s PolyCam camera imaged Bennu almost daily as the spacecraft traveled 1.4 million miles (2.2 million km) toward the asteroid.

Bennu Full Rotation at a Distance of 50 Miles – OSIRIS-REx Mission

This series of images taken by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft shows Bennu in one full rotation from a distance of around 50 miles (80 km). The spacecraft’s PolyCam camera obtained the 36 2.2-millisecond frames over a period of four hours and 18 minutes.

OSIRIS-REx Arrives at Bennu

After traveling through space for more than two years and over two billion kilometers, NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft arrived at its destination, asteroid Bennu, on Monday, Dec. 3, 2018.

What’s Next for NASA’s OSIRIS-REx Probe at Asteroid Bennu?

NASA’s first asteroid-sampling mission has arrived at its destination, but it still has a lot of prep work ahead before the spacecraft can bite into the space rock. Yesterday (Dec. 3), NASA’s OSIRIS-REx probe sidled up to its diamond-shaped target, the near-Earth asteroid Bennu, ending a deep-space chase that lasted 27 months and covered more than 1.25 billion miles (2 billion kilometers).

I hope you’re not all partied out after the InSight lander’s successful touchdown on Mars this week, because there’s another big spaceflight event just around the corner. NASA’s OSIRIS-REx probe will officially arrive at the near-Earth asteroid Bennu at about 12 p.m. EST (1700 GMT) on Monday (Dec. 3), ending a 27-month deep-space chase. NASA will mark the occasion with a special webcast event from 11:45 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. EST (1645 to 1715 GMT), which you can watch live here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA TV.

While the Soyuz spacecraft has been delivering crews to space for decades, with a history of reliability over that time, changes in the industry mean that Russia is now struggling to keep its spaceflights safe, said an expert on the Russian space program. However, he said he does expect more safety checks ahead of the Expedition 58 launch on Dec. 3, which will include a U.S. astronaut

Success of Tiny Mars Probes Heralds New Era of Deep-Space Cubesats

The era of the interplanetary cubesat has definitively dawned. Less than seven months ago, no tiny spacecraft had ever voyaged beyond Earth orbit. But two briefcase-size probes just blazed a trail all the way to Mars, covering 301 million deep-space miles (484 million kilometers) and beaming home data from NASA’s InSight lander during the latter’s successful touchdown on the Red Planet Monday (Nov. 26).